


Other Empires

by scioscribe



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Mysticism, Pet Sociopath, Ritual Sex, Sex As Bargaining Chip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 15:20:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16390193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “Tuunbaq,” Hickey says.  The word is music to him.  “An unearthly thing, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Crozier?”Crozier regards him with a gaze free of passion, free of curiosity.  “I would.”“A spirit that dresses like an animal.  Did you ever ask yourself if it might also dress like a man?”





	Other Empires

The men know better than to disturb him.

Hickey wanted a warmer world once, some place with no snow, just sand as white and fine as sugar.  But the Arctic suits him.  London flaunted green parks and tea from China and three-tiered puddings out of _Beeton’s_ , but all it had ever given him was potato peels, crusts of bread, and a hard-earned education.  The Arctic’s honest in its desolation.  Ice and rocks and salt and bone, sharp and hard.  The sun a bleached-out white hole in the sky, when the sun deigns to rise on them at all.  Here there’s power rawer and more potent than any he’s seen before.

He keeps company with that power, and the men he’s brought with him know it.  It’s not fear that keeps them in line, not when he’s armed them all the way to their back teeth, and it isn’t love.  He’s never held anyone’s heart.

They don’t even follow him because he can feed them, because they know now where those hot suppers are going to come from, they know now what’ll happen when they slip in the harness.

Put a shot through his head and any one of them might be saving his own life; a man could do that and still put a fork through his fellows when the time comes, when his belly’s empty enough.  Hickey’s not a visionary in that regard.  Not the first among shipwreck survivors, here or anywhere, to look at a portly man like Lieutenant Hodgson and see so much potted meat.  So when it comes right down to it, they could do the filleting themselves if they truly had to.

But they follow him all the same.  He lays a table for them and they sit, neat and orderly as salt and pepper pots all in a row.  They pull him about like good little horses.

And why?  Because they know.  Soon they’ll carve dolls for him out of ivory and bone.

In the meantime, they go and fetch him Captain Crozier.

 

* * *

 

Crozier’s changed since last they were eye-to-eye.  That turnip head of his has taken a beating; he’s split open from brow to temple, a gash like a cut from a paring knife.  And he’s older.  Grief’s been at him, softening him, he’s soaked up tears like a sponge all full of water.

But he’s got all his teeth and he doesn’t walk like he’s got glass in his joints.  They match there as they’ve always matched, and looking at him, Hickey feels the same old pull.  Up here all the compasses sicken into uselessness, so there must be other poles for direction.

“ _Tuunbaq_ ,” Hickey says.  The word is music to him.  “An unearthly thing, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Crozier?”

Crozier regards him with a gaze free of passion, free of curiosity.  “I would.”

“A spirit that dresses like an animal.  Did you ever ask yourself if it might also dress like a man?”

“I hadn’t concerned myself.”  Crozier gestures, and though his hand can’t encompass anything that isn’t the walls of their tent, bought and paid for from British shipbrokers, he says, “This place, this creature, they’re not not ours, Mr. Hickey.  Not ours to understand.”

“Ah, but I do understand it.  What have we seen of it, after all?  It’s got cunning.  Teeth and claws.  It takes more than you’d think to even drive it off, let alone kill it.  Your Esquimaux, they must have some bargain with it, that it spares them and hunts us instead.  And some of the men say it brought game to Lady Silence, kept her from eating too much from our poisoned tins.  Think of that.  What it would be like, to have such a creature at your command?”

Crozier’s eyes are the color of the cold itself.  “You want to bind it to you.”

“For a man so sharp, you’ve got a knack for cutting out the words I’m saying and reading just the page that’s left.  It’s almost tidy how well you miss the point every time.  You don’t hear my accent, Mr. Crozier, you only hear it’s not yours.  I bring you Lady Silence and you see treachery.”

“I saw cruelty,” Crozier says.  The word’s a flick of the whip.

It makes Hickey smile.  “And you’d know nothing of cruelty.”

He leans forward until he can smell the stink of wool that’s been on a body so long the sweat’s begun to grease it like lanolin.  He can see the tallow-colored hairs on Crozier’s cheek.  His skin’s flushed pink with blood.  Bodies are hot even on the ice: cut them open and they steam.  And Hickey’s been cold for so long—he’s had a lifetime, it feels like, of turning up his collar, cupping his hands up in threadbare gloves, having ambitions for a warm bed.  All that’s over now.

He says, “You could have something like that, Mr. Crozier.”

“A _tuunbaq_.”

“A spirit,” Hickey says, drawing his fingers lightly down his own chest, stopping over his heart, “that dresses as a man.”

Crozier barks out a laugh.  “The lead’s eaten away at your mind.”

So that’s what bedeviled the tins.  He collects that fact—it’s small but it has a certain shine to it—but he doesn’t give an answer to it.

“You think you’re not a man,” Crozier says.  “Not a mortal man.”

“Oh, I can bleed.  You’ve had proof of that.  But I am hard to kill, Mr. Crozier, and you’ve proof of that too.”

“You really believe it.”  His voice is wondering: at last, something has roused the man.  At last, Hickey has his full attention.  “What’s your power then, Mr. Hickey?  What proof do you have, aside from being a rat that scurries away from a boot?”

“A caulker’s mate who’d not even been on a ship before,” Hickey says, “and I took some of your own officers out from underneath your nose.  I stood with a rope around my neck and you recounting all my sins, as you saw them, and I still had men at my heels when I left camp.  I’ve brought death.  I’ve eaten a man’s flesh and had others sup of him too.  If you’d call me a monster only when it suits you—well, let it suit you now.”

“That you’d call yourself one is what amazes me.”

“I’ve come to know my nature, here.  Everything before this—”  He shakes his head.  “Like paper wrapped around a magic lantern.  And this is the flame.”

He doesn’t expect Crozier to believe him yet, but he has one more truth to offer.

“You saw hell burning on the ice the night of Carnivale.  I was the only man outside that tent, and I’m the one who wielded the knife to cut the rest of you free.  I can save us.”  He shifts his weight and puts his mouth close to Crozier’s ear, knows Crozier feels the heat of his breath.  “If you ask me.”

Crozier turns his head closer in.  They’re pressed together now, cheek-to-cheek like lovers.  “Save us, then, please.”

He chuckles.  This is better than a shared drink.

Crozier almost smiles at him; Hickey can see the corner of his mouth twitch.  Crozier doesn’t want to know him, but he does.

“You don’t count that, then.”  Crozier leans back and the cold slips between them for a moment.  “What is it I’d have for the asking?”

Hickey ticks items off on his fingers.  “The return of all your men, for a start.  The supplies we’ve taken.  My cooperation with your aims, such as they are.  You don’t believe me on this yet, but I’ll keep you fed too, Mr. Crozier, and safe on every step of the long walk south.  Is that enough or should I keep going?”

They are done, he knows.  Crozier is still self-righteous—he won’t refuse to give himself over, not when it could snatch his precious men, the recipients of his lordly beneficence, from Hickey’s hand.  But:

“One thing more,” Crozier says, his voice hoarse.

Hickey raises his eyebrows.

“Commander Fitzjames’s boots.”

It’s a stripe of sentimentality he can’t understand or reckon with.  He forgot he even wore them.  “They’ll be yours.”

He waits for Crozier to ask if they made a meal there as well, but Crozier aspires to squeamishness alongside sentiment, and he stops his questions there, except to ask what it is Hickey requires of him.

It’s a wearily-delivered question.  As of yet, Crozier won’t have him on faith; he’s swallowing down the bitter pill of madness for his own gain.  What a dullness an adherence to duty gives a man, even one so close to being his match, that Crozier would bind their souls together, against his own liking, just to save traitors.

But it only drives home how right Hickey is to choose him.  It takes all Crozier’s misconceptions to lower him down this far—when Hickey strips him of those, Crozier will be something very great indeed.  He’ll be worthy to hold one end of the chain Hickey’s assembling for himself.

Hickey says lightly, “You know what the _tuunbaq_ asked of the Eskis.”

Lady Silence spitting up blood all over the snow.

Crozier would let Hickey take that from him, too.  They’re inheriting each other’s skins, the darkest intimacies of them: to reach into Crozier’s mouth and cut out his tongue in a welter of dark blood would be nothing at all.

Tongue is good, cheap meat.  Drown it in boiling water, with onions if you have them, strip off the rough skin.  Or just eat it raw, as they did with Billy: a slippery bit of muscle like a still-wriggling fish.  For a moment he could almost change his mind.

But just as Crozier nods, Hickey shakes his head.

“Not like that,” he says.

“Then what?”

Hickey shrugs and stands.  “It’s not an offering if you don’t offer it.”

Crozier understands him in the end.  That’s how their contract is made—in truth, Hickey thinks he needs nothing more than the look in Crozier’s eyes when he accepts it.  He feels his soul lock into Crozier’s, gear-teeth into gear-teeth; he believes that Crozier feels it too.

In the tent, there’s nothing to lean against.  He just stands there, straight-backed and weary and smiling, while Crozier fumbles his prick out of his trousers.  The wind parts the tent flaps, blows them in and out, but there’s no one opposite them to see.  His men steer clear of him whenever they can; more proof of his power, that he doesn’t attract Crozier’s own herd of gossips and schemers.  No one will ever pluck a letter off his desk or a secret from his mouth.

Hickey is glad for it.  He’s protective of this moment between them, this newborn ritual.

“You must know what to do,” he says, putting his hand against Crozier’s jawline, rubbing his thumb on Crozier’s chin.  In another moment, they’ll belong to each other, but here Hickey’s possession of him is one-sided and unequivocal.  He enjoys it.

“I do.”  Crozier’s voice is even.  Hickey wonders what man he’s thinking of, what dalliances early or late.

Crozier breathes in.  His face is close enough to Hickey’s cock that he feels the inhalation as well, a soft puckering of air against his skin.

There is no exhalation.  Crozier takes him in his mouth.

The cold makes it all the better.  It takes a bit of work for him to stiffen up, his balls are drawn up so tight to his body, but the contrast between the dry frozen air and the hot wet pressure of Crozier’s mouth is pleasure sweet as a ripe plum.

Crozier is clumsy with him.  Loathing or merely lack of practice?  Hickey remembers his own early efforts with this task, in stinking alleys with ham hock-heavy hands on the back of his neck; it took him a long time to come to what was desirable about it.  The smell of the right man, the taste of him, the burning in his eyes and throat with pride at having used himself in such a way.  His lust was half-defiance.

But those days are long gone.  He has nothing left to defy and little to desire.  He is fucking the mouth of the only man alive who can captain him: they’re locked in mutual ownership.

He needed Crozier all along.  He can’t imagine sharing himself this way with Tozer or even with Billy.  Goodsir bucks more than those sweet sad eyes of his would imply; he wouldn’t let himself be mastered this way, no matter what rewards would come of it.  No, it was always going to be Crozier, drunk or sober, vindictive or full of starchy, intolerable honor.  They’ve both found their natural places.

He has always been too much, gone too far.  Now he’ll have someone to call him back again.  Now he’ll be cared for.  He’s earned that.

Hickey grabs what he can of Crozier’s hair, which is trimmed too short for him to find much purchase, and presses forward further into him.  It’s the only burial possible out here.

He spends in Crozier’s mouth in two final thrusts, his ears pounding, and then he steadies himself with his palm on the back of Crozier’s head.  He lets the ink on their contract dry.  An uncanny peace descends upon him.  This is what it feels like, he thinks, to have another.

When Crozier stands, his knees pop, but it’s only age.  Hickey was right: Crozier’s been preserved for him, preserved by him.  It’s a pattern he’ll hold to.  They are one thing now.

In the first words of their new life together, Hickey says, “The scurvy’s not in you.”

Crozier’s got the taste of Hickey’s seed still on his tongue.  Just because Hickey left it in his head doesn’t mean he hasn’t claimed it.

It takes Crozier a moment to answer him, as if he’s feeling his way around all that.  “No.”

“Nor in me.”

 _That’s a shame,_ Crozier’s eyes say.  “The boots.”

Hickey strips them off without hesitation.  He hands them over and stands there in his stocking-feet, shivering and curling his toes against the ground.  “What are you going to do with them, even.”

It isn’t a question because he knows Crozier won’t—can’t—give him an answer.  He isn’t going to reconnoiter out Fitzjames’s grave again and slide these back on his moldering body, not if it means having to see whether or not any chunks of flesh have gone with the leather.

But Hickey gets an answer after all.  An honest one, even.

“I’m not going to do anything besides keep them away from you.”  Crozier squeezes one boot.  What he feels there makes him crumble away at the edges.  “You stuffed them at the toes.”

“He was a tall man,” Hickey says.  He’s indifferent to this.  “I’m not.”

“They didn’t even fit, goddamn you.”  He presses a hand to his face.  “You could have left them with him—at least given them to a man in your company of the proper size.  Someone who loved him a little.”

Hickey bears all this out in silence.  He’s made do with ill-fitting boots most of his life; he can count on one hand the number of times he wore a pair that weren’t stuffed or slit for size or else patched for holes.  When Crozier’s little fit of rectitude is done with, only then does Hickey say, “You’ll want to feed the men again before you make them walk.  There’s meat left for it.  And we’ve some of your maps on hand, the ones with the wrecked ships where we might be able to shelter or resupply.  You’ll be wanting those as well.”

 

* * *

 

“We go back now, lads,” Hickey says as everyone picks listlessly at their dinner.

Starving men are more than choosy than they’ve any right to be: they will eat whatever is in front of them, but they will do it begrudgingly, tracking blood across their tin plates like snail-trails as they pull gobbets of meat slowly towards them.  Hickey’s announcement stirs them.

“You’re joking,” Tozer says.  He’s come over the color of chalk.

“Captain Crozier and I have reached an agreement.  You’ll all be seeing your friends again.”

Goodsir ignores him entirely to look to Crozier instead, who nods.  Goodsir’s hands are shaking, little trembles of confession: what things he has done here.  There’s no use feeling shame for it, Hickey wants to tell him.  He only did what it took to live.

“But what happened to how we’d all starve,” Manson says, “how we’d be slowed down…”

Hickey will crack him across the mouth if he has to.  He’ll enjoy it.  “We won’t starve.  And however slowly we walk, we’ll make it south.”

“Where they’ll hang us.”

“They won’t hang you,” Crozier says.  “I won’t let men at home judge what’s happened here, not if we all come together now.”

“They’ll hang _you_ , Cornelius,” Tozer says.

Hickey has never granted him that name, an intimate one even though it belongs to a stranger.  He smiles, wide and dangerous.  “Let them try.”

After that, they break down the camp quickly.  Morning will see them tracking their way back to Crozier’s most stubbornly loyal.  The whole family reunited like they’re going to sit down to a Sunday roast.

Hickey keeps his eyes on his shaman, willing Crozier to see what he’s done, to feel all he’s capable of.  In this loneliest of places, it’s disbelief that’s hard to come by.  What is he, truly?  One more impossible thing in a world of them.  The spirit of England, stripped of all its vanity and pretense, with just a carved-up shinbone doll for his monument.  There’s a man like him behind every empire there ever was.  He thinks tonight he’ll tell Crozier his true name.


End file.
